Background: Executive function (EF) plays a crucial role in children's reading. However, previous studies were based on offline products of reading comprehension. Online research is needed to reveal the core mechanisms underlying children's reading processing. By measuring children's working memory (WM) and cognitive flexibility (CF), we…

The sentence superiority effect observed with skilled adult readers has been taken to reflect parallel processing of word identities and the rapid construction of a preliminary syntactic structure. Here we examined if such processing is already present in primary school children in Grade 3 (average age 8.9 years). Children saw sequences of four…

Background: A significant portion of adults struggle to read at a basic level. Word reading (defined here as decoding and word recognition) appears to play a pivotal role for this population of readers; however, less is known about how word reading relates to other important semantic processes (e.g., vocabulary, sentence processing) known to…

This study analyzes the relationship between phonemic proficiency and orthographic learning in first and second-grade students. It is established in the empirical literature that phonemic skills play a crucial role in word-level reading. What is not thoroughly understood is why some children learn and remember words more efficiently than others.…

Background: Efficient word identification is directly tied to strong mental representations of words, which include spellings, meanings and pronunciations. Orthographic learning is the process by which spellings for individual words are acquired. Methods: In the present study, we combined the classic self-teaching paradigm with eye tracking to…

Purpose: There is a long-standing debate about how written words are recognized. Central to this debate is the role of phonology. The objective of this study is to contribute to our collective understanding regarding the role of phonology in written word recognition. Method: A total of 30 monolingual adults were tested using a novel written word…

The morphological structure of complex words impacts how they are processed during visual word recognition. This impact varies over the course of reading acquisition and for different languages and writing systems. Many theories of morphological processing rely on a decomposition mechanism, in which words are decomposed into explicit…

Prelingually and profoundly deaf individuals learn to read without complete access to the sounds of language. Nevertheless, many become proficient readers, and the neurocognitive underpinnings of deaf readers' processes differ from those of hearing readers, particularly in orthographic processing. In English, morphological structure is relatively…

Individual differences in reading performance between children appear from the onset of literacy acquisition. One possible explanation for this variability is the influence of inhibition in reading ability, a topic that has received very little research attention. Nevertheless, children often make guessing errors characterized by replacing a word…

Background: When reading a word, skilled adult readers automatically decompose the word into its separate morphemes by processing the word's morpho-orthography. In children, however, it still remains unclear when and how they start to automatically decompose words into morphemes. Methods: To better understand how primary school children learn and…

Purpose: Adults recognize words that are acquired during childhood more quickly than words acquired during adulthood. This is known as the Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect. The AoA effect, according to the integrated account, manifests in tasks necessitating greater semantic processing and in tasks with arbitrary input-output mapping. Compound…

This dissertation investigates the impact of cross-modal binding on word reading skills among English Language Learners (ELLs). Using Baddeley's updated working memory model, which includes the Episodic Buffer, this study examines how the ability to bind visual and phonological information in memory influences the reading development of ELL…

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

This study investigated second language learners' processing of ambiguous words (e.g., "bank": [1] a financial institution, [2] an edge of a river/lake) and whether these learners are able to activate the secondary meaning as quickly as they do with the dominant meaning. English L2 and L1 participants used a window paradigm to perform a…